Albert Kao (Harvard University)
Abstract. Organisms, such as animals or bacteria, can employ a variety of movement behaviors (such as the “tumble-and-run” strategy in E. coli) in order to search for and locate favorable environments. While these individuals tend to occupy a well-defined position in space at a given moment in time, other organisms, such as plants and fungal mycelial networks or even animal groups, can be highly distributed spatially. This may allow these organisms to utilize novel search strategies inaccessible to individual animals; for example, multiple microenvironments may be sampled simultaneously and information about their relative quality integrated and compared. Recently, I have been conducting experiments on the slime mold Physarum polycephalum, which is a single-celled but macroscopic organism that can exhibit many taxis behaviors, and whose size can span several orders of magnitude. Its morphology is an interconnected network of tubes, which can dynamically reshape as it searches its environment and exploits food patches. My work seeks to address the following questions: what strategies can the slime mold use to effectively search its environment, and how does the slime mold balance the dual, and possibly conflicting, uses of its network morphology as both as a movement behavior and transport network?